Businesses will often have multiple business locations to serve a large area. The multiple business locations generally are scattered throughout various regions of the business' area of service, so that customers may conveniently seek the service of the business within the customer's geographic area. Also, it is convenient for a business to have a location within a customer's geographic area to minimize service response time when the business provides a service in which the business either delivers and/or picks up goods at the customer's location. This is especially true for a franchised pizza delivery business for example.
While it is convenient and efficient for a business to have multiple locations in various regions of the business' area of service, it is likewise convenient and efficient for the business to have a single advertised directory number that is applicable to all of the multiple business locations within the business' area of service. Having a single advertised number helps to eliminate the expenses which would otherwise be associated with advertising the different locations individually with a different phone number for each of the locations.
Solutions to this problem have been addressed whereby businesses obtain an 800 telephone number which is used as the single business number and callers of the 800 number are routed to a dealer based upon the NPA-NXX of the calling party's number, NPA-NXX-XXXX, (where NPA is the calling party's area code, NXX is the central office code and XXXX identifies a particular station in the central office code). U.S. Pat. No. 4,757,267 to Riskin discloses a system in which a call is routed to a nearby dealer based upon the coordinates of the central office (NPA-NXX) serving the dealer. The system first receives a call from a caller then outdials to a dealer, and crossconnects the incoming call to the outgoing call if the dealer is available. The system monitors both lines during this process. This process can be both inefficient and uneconomical.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,636 to Wegrynowicz discloses a method of routing a call in which a primary database is accessed using the caller's NPA and 800 directory number to provide an access key which identifies the customer. The access key plus the calling party's NPA-NXX is used to locate the translation information in a second database to identify a local dealer.
While each of these patents disclose a method of routing a call to a business location based on the caller's NPA-NXX, neither discloses a method for accomplishing routing on a sufficiently granular basis when a business has multiple locations within the NXX. Moreover neither patent discloses a method for mapping a calling party's geographic location when fine granularity is required. With NPA-NXX routing, a multiple location business within an area served by an NPA-NXX (central office) is not sufficiently able to distinguish and therefore route calls to the most appropriate location.
Thus, there is a need in the art to provide a method for routing calls in which a business is able to route calls to the most appropriate business location within an NPA-NXX.